$20 Sex For A $20 Bag

Chris Garabedian whispers to a gaunt, flinty fellow. Does he want to go out? And yeah, OK.

They drive to a spot she knows, behind a boarded-up movie house in the South End of Hartford. The word "Available" is up on the marquee as if it were the title of a show.

They roll back their seats in his small, beat-up car, the red one with the bumper sticker that brags, "Legend in My Own Bedroom."

He had another car, everybody remembers it. Rumor has it Chris' old boyfriend, the bank robber, stole it.

She takes off her leather jacket, and her date tells her to unbutton her blouse, too. She does.

He admires her breasts and she strokes his thin, gray hair.

He is one of the regulars who sit at the McDonald's at Park and Washington for hours at a time, talking among themselves about the news and drinking coffee, purveying rumors, visiting with "the girls" like her who come in from the cold to fix their makeup, get high. Sometimes the men give the girls money, rides. Sometimes a place to sleep.

He wants her to kiss him. He's into that.

That's something she really hates to do.

"The date that wants to be kissed. Think about that for a moment. This guy knows that what you are doing is performing fellatio several times a night and wants to kiss you. This man is in denial of reality. This is a sick individual."

He's a regular.

She kisses him. Then he leans back and closes his eyes.

"With regulars, you got to give them special treatment," she says.

She goes on to his place after the parking lot. The whole thing takes more than an hour.

"A lot longer than I'd spend on most customers. You need your regulars."

He gets oral sex and intercourse for $70.

Most customers come out to the streets for oral sex. The

average act costs $20 and takes 90 seconds.

"The dates I like the best are the guys that are just being honest with themselves and with me," she says. "Where instead of approaching the young lady and taking her out to dinner, spending the obligatory amount of money and going through the motions and trying to get a piece at the end of the evening, he takes that amount of money and says to me: `I'd like sex with you and I can give you this amount of money.' And I say, `I will have sex with you for that amount of money.'

"Those are my favorite dates," she says. "Because I genuinely feel like they respect me because they respect themselves."

A young girl working Washington Street, sucking a lollipop.

On Vernon Street, another girl climbs into the cab of a garbage truck.

On the stroll, skinny hips pumping like wings.

They come and go, many homeless as birds. When you start to look, they are everywhere, like birds. Fluid, driven by need, landing over and over in the same place.

"Every day is the same for these people. Every day they have to hustle. Every day they have to get high," says Michael Carbone, the city health department worker who ministers to these streets.

They don't like Sundays because so many of the johns have the day off and don't drive into the city. "It affects business for the girls," Carbone says. "They get angry."

He was tempted by the girls when he first started this work. He was lonely, a recovering addict himself.

Many are beautiful.

They all wear masks.

He sees the masks come off sometimes, especially when he drives the health department's outreach van. He will park it in the neighborhood, and one girl or another will come in to talk for a while, get warm, feel safe. And sometimes she will just bawl. Everything falls away. Then it will be time to go. She lights another cigarette, clamps the mask back on and walks away into the dark.

"Drugs are symptomatic of incest, rape, anger," says Carbone. "We're not born with love and self-esteem. Most of these girls have been raped and abused. It's incredible the different starting blocks people have."

They never grew up, or learned to cope. Fragile and terrified, they numb their self-loathing, medicate their pain with heroin. The cocaine keeps them going, gives them the strength to earn more for heroin.

This goes for all of them, says Lori Schoen, who is one of them.

"All of them. Any prostitute out there is because they've been hurt and they run. Every one of them out there, and not one of them can tell you different. Not one of them. That's all their doing. They are running. Every one of them is on some type of drug, and if they are telling you they are not, they are lying."

Things can get pretty desperate out on these streets, when a person is half crazy for the drugs.

While the going rate for oral sex is $20, at the right moment, with the right person, it can be bought for as little as $5.